Trillion Dollar Forgery: Oddities

Okay, so there's some strange stuff sloshing around the internet about this.

Let's begin with a Bloomberg story.  Excerpts:

...Gombar says his first whiff of the bond con came in 1976, while working in the agency’s Los Angeles office investigating a similar bluff involving Venezuelan government paper.


“Nowadays the bonds are almost always U.S. Treasuries from the 1930s, and the forgers have grown more sophisticated,” Gombar says. “They go to great extremes, putting them in antiquated treasure chests stuffed with newspaper clippings from the 1930s. It takes a great deal of time and trouble to print these bonds and establish the con.” ...

“I’ve never seen forgeries like these,” says Winslow, who for 27 years has authenticated bonds for governments, companies, museums and private collectors.

He describes the box set of 250 Umayamnon bonds as a series of 10 historically inaccurate and haphazardly assembled $100 million “bundled instruments,” each packet designed to represent and lend support to an illusionary $25 billion “United States of America Federal Reserved Bond.”

The Umayamnon bonds first appeared in the Philippine wilderness courtesy of “tao-boung, the white men who fell from heaven,” says Estrella, who for the past 20 years, according to Cojuangco and Quiwa, has helped government officials tend to the needs of the 18 indigenous and mostly Muslim clans that inhabit the archipelago’s easternmost island, encouraging them to break ties with the radical Islamic group Abu Sayyaf. He says the chests were given to him by a datu, or tribal chief.

“I believe the bonds are real,” Estrella says. “A datu does not tell lies.”

...“We’ve never been able to find and shut down the manufacturing plants,” he says.

Giovanniello says agents came close in February 2001, when a joint Secret Service and Philippine National Police unit detained Archie Mingoc, Filipino, with $2 trillion worth of pretend U.S. bonds in Cagayan de Oro, a city on Mindanao.

The hunt began three years earlier, Giovanniello says, when U.S. Customs Service agents discovered billions of dollars of fraudulent bonds in the luggage of a Filipino priest at Los Angeles International Airport. It eventually led to a shanty outside Cagayan de Oro, where police found two more suitcases. One was filled with $773 billion in fake bonds. The other held $1.38 trillion worth of bogus federal paper...

Now, for the truly odd.

First:  this guy has an extensive, conspiracy minded, extensive "explanation" for everything which, well...

The main interesting thing is--he's got photos of boxes that look a lot like the ones found by the Italian police.  Scroll down a ways on his post to see the photos of the boxes, as well as photos of heaps of alleged bonds, etc.

Secondly:  there is a lawsuit which has been filed in a court in New York in which a story is laid out which sounds like a Dan Brown creation, filed by a guy who claims to be acting on behalf of "the Dragon Family," a group which sounds like something out of...well, a Dan Brown novel.  Here's one court watching site's description of the suit.  Excerpts:

An American expatriate in Bulgaria claims the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, the Office of International Treasury Control and the Italian government conspired with a host of others to steal more than $1.1 trillion in financial instruments intended to support humanitarian purposes.

     The 111-page federal complaint involves a range of entities common to conspiracy theorists, including the Vatican Illuminati, the Masons, the "Trilateral Trillenium Tripartite Gold Commission," and the U.S. Federal Reserve...

Here's another discussion of the suit from the guy with the massive conspiracy theory.

Now the Office of International Treasury Control appears to be a massive con, crafted in order to attempt to defraud countries of billions if they can, according to Wikipedia.  The list of defendants includes the OITC and its ostensible head Ray C. Dam.  It is perfectly plausible, in light of the history laid out on the Wiki page, that the OITC defrauded somebody of something, such that it would prompt a lawsuit.  The suit also lists as defendants the Italian government, Italian representatives to the UN, and the Italian financial police, which make sense since the Italian government has been seizing these bonds in 2009 and more recently.  According to one story, the latest seizure of $6 trillion in fake bonds occurred in November of 2011, which would be the same month the lawsuit was filed.  Excerpts:

...The bonds were found hidden inside false compartments in three reinforced metal crates found in Zurich and eight arrests were made in Italy in an investigation aided by the U.S. Secret Service and U.S. technical experts.

“These fictitious bonds were apparently part of a plan to defraud some Swiss banks,” the U.S. embassy in Rome said in a statement congratulating Italy on Operation Vulcania, which actually took place in November last year...

According to other sources, the seizure took place in January or the Friday before the story broke.

If some group originally owned the bonds and still believes them to be of value, it would make sense that they would seek either recompense or the return of the bonds.

Thirdly, it appears that boxes like the ones seized by the Italian authorities have been turning up across the world (more). 

At which point, we would seem to have either an extensive scam backed up by large quantities of money in order for the major players in said scam to be making all the globe-trotting journeys it appears that they have made, coupled with a quite bogus lawsuit filed for some reason in New York; a real series of bonds that was previously not publicly acknowledged; or the most remarkably strange network of stories I've ever seen.

Motive?  According to this story:

...Italian daily Corriere della Sera said on its website that the criminal network was believed to be interested in acquiring plutonium, citing sources at the prosecutors' office...

There appears to be a consistent Asian connection (also mentioned in the Bloomberg story). Excerpt:

...In September 2009, Italian police seized US$116 billion in phoney bonds and arrested two Filipino nationals carrying them at Milan's airport.

In June of the same year police arrested two Japanese nationals on the Italian-Swiss border carrying bonds with a face value of US$134 billion...

Excerpt:

...The bonds were found hidden in false compartments in three safety deposit boxes transferred in 2007 from Hong Kong to Zurich and eight arrests have also been made in Italy as part of the investigation, prosecutors said...

Here's video of the Italian police with the haul:

So.  Here's a novel waiting to be written.  And Asian forgers--would you leave the US economy alone?  We're doing just fine at tanking it without any help from you, thank you.